Peter's Fiction and Essays

Tag: memory

Careful how you peel it, succulent as it looks. No doubt it is foreign, but not completely unfamiliar. Juicy, seductive, already there is a bite out of it. Surely you want to taste before judging, so search your memory, maybe deep in the tangles there is a useful experience, a reference point to pivot from. If not, open wide.
From Cuba: An Adventure in Image and Word, Opening Reception Friday May 16 5-8pm Abend Gallery Denver. I’ll be reading at the Reception.

Having lived a life full of children and grandchildren, spouses and lovers, work and adventure, with enough integrity in the end to apply the vague term happiness, Chandra is strangely disconcerted to discover death does not equal non-existence.
At first Chandra assumes the windy, dark luminescence is part of the death process, until there is no sequence of events, no movement, no curiosity, and no reason to get there.
Yet Chandra remembers being Chandra, indistinctly, as if memories are dreams of time and space minus history and reason.
Chandra has a sense, not one of the five, but complete and neutral. Chandra wants to call it a feeling of the soul because there is no choice but to borrow familiar nomenclature.
The dark wind feels like enveloping water, Chandra drowning calmly without fear that time will lead to an unknowable future, or that space could propose any obstacle.
And the familiar is a cookied page haunting Chandra’s soul, filling its emptiness, blowing in the luminescence, a benign virus swirling in the water.
When the water breaks and the womb births Chandra remembers Chandra for milliseconds or millennia before the nurse slaps Chandra’s bottom, a new breath is drawn, and the memory of Chandra is lost in the after and before.